Odds and Ends (and More About Digital B&W)

Good morning! This weekís column is mainly housekeeping ó I hope you donít
mind. Itís August, the dog days for those of us who live where there are four seasons. Many
of you are on vacation, or leaving on vacation soon, or just getting back from vacation, and
thatís the first order of housekeeping: Iím leaving town, theoretically for two weeks, and will
be out of e-mail range until the middle of August. So there wonít be an SMP for the next two
weeks, and, if you write to comment, complain, or order something, I wonít be able to help
until after I get back and dig out.

For the first time, Iím genuinely concerned about the ďdigging outĒ part. I now get so much
spam that itís threatening to interfere with the way I communicate with people and the way I
do business. I wonder, and worry about, how many garbage e-mails Iíll have in my in-box
when I return. Five hundred? A thousand? It could be more. Why do we allow this? I do my
best to turn it off, but itís like fighting a flood with sandbags. As Ďnetizens, weíve just got to do
something about spam. Somewhere, somehow, I hope someone with at least a little power
to influence the World is attending to this ever-worsening problem. Iíll pray for them.

I get mail ó hoo boy, do I get mail.

I got a lot of the of messages (the good kind) after last weekís column. About 40
people wrote. Many people wondered whether Iíd heard about this or that ó the
Kodak DCS 760M, Piezography, ColorByteís ImagePrint RIP, the 2200, Lyson Quad Black,
or some other system, inkset, or piece of equipment. Some of them I knew about and some
of them I didnít. I didnít want to name specific companies last week, at least companies of
the smaller, alternative variety. I havenít tried most of these things, and hearsay evidence
isnít a good enough foundation for criticizing a company that might actually care. Unless Iíve
tried something myself, Iím not really comfortable judging it by name.

Perhaps predictably, I heard from more people who agreed than disagreed with what I had
to say. Only four people who wrote professed to be totally happy with the way they make
black-and-white prints from digital files. One uses an Epson 1160 with hand-injected MIS
inks, one sends digital files to Costco for printing on their boss Noritsus, and one thinks
native 2200 prints look pretty good. (The first two are veteran photographers with many
decades of experience.) I also heard from people who had spent more than a thousand
dollars and still havenít arrived at a really satisfying methodology; who have quit B&W inkjet
printing altogether because of clogging problems; and many who, like me, are simply still
watching, waiting, and wanting.

The biggest misunderstanding seemed to from the few e-mailers who felt like I was saying
that nobody is doing good work in B&W. My column was only intended to bemoan the lack of
a set-and-forget solution directly from the manufacturers. The problem I hear repeatedly and
endlessly from photographers all over the world is that the expense and headaches of setting
up a customized solution to their B&W printing needs often outweighs the benefits.
Obviously, dedicated artists, computer and printing experts, and labs or custom printmakers
can overcome the problems; there are plenty of custom ateliers that can make
great B&W prints. But I wasn't talking about that. Far more often what I hear from amateur
photographers is that theyíre experiencing various problems, or that it's difficult for them to
know which way they should go without actually trying the alternatives for themselves. There
are dozens if not hundreds of solutions and a thousand problems out there and nobody can
truly answer the questions anybody else has because everybody's setup is different. So,
most typically, people have to go through a long, hard period of experimentation (and
sometimes a lot of expense) to end up with something they're satisfied with.

Itís just unnecessary, is all. Or at least it seems so, in my opinion.

Of course, depending on how far you go back, there might seem to be a certain justice in
this. For many years, ďthe colors of photography were black and white,Ē to quote Robert
Frank, and color photographers were the poor forgotten stepchildren of photography ó
consigned to darkened living rooms and noisy slide projectors, or in darkrooms
following multiple-step processes and trying to control temperatures to within a quarter of a
degree. Now, of course, the situation is reversed ó color, liberated by digital
and Adobe, is King, and B&W is the stepchild, finally.

One result of that column, however, was that I received a package in the mail from Lyson
(one of the companies I hadnít heard of prior to this past week), who sent me a few sample
packs of papers and their Quad Black inks ó which they make for Canon
printers, the type I have. Since Lyson gives away the needed ICC profiles for free
(downloadable from their site), all thatís really needed is the inks, paper, Photoshop, and a
printer, and away you go. I probably wonít have time to test the system thoroughly until
September, but rest assured Iíll give it the old college try and report on my stumblings and
strivings in a future column. I fervently hope I come away with egg on my face vis-ŗ-vis last week.

News and ideas

The bookís still not a book yet. Why is it that everything takes so much longer than it seems
like it should? On the newsletter front, though, thereís better news ó issue #5 is
fresh off the presses as of a day or two ago, and theyíre currently stacked high on the floor of
my study. I got about a fifth of them mailed today, and three or four hundred more Iíll take with
me on vacation to stuffínísend. Iíll send the remainder when I get back. I canít say when Iíll get
to whom, but watch yer mailbox.

The pictures with this column are from where Iím going. Every year, I threaten to do a
week-long photographersí workshop there. But the logistics and the finances never seem to
align properly. Perhaps, like Venus and Mars, they will someday.

Finally, I donít usually do things like this in this column, but, since this is a housekeeping
column, perhaps youíll forgive me this time. Iím desperately looking for a -2
Canon Diopter S for the A series cameras. If you have one you donít want, youíve got me
right where you want me ó Iím your patsy. If you respond to this, though, do
remember that I wonít be back in e-mail range until I get home.

So remember, no columns for the next two weeks ó then Iíll get going again with
a vengeance (I currently have five columns, count Ďem, five, in the works). See you later in the
month. Until then, good light, and good luck.

ó Mike Johnston

Visit Mike Johnstonís web site at http://www.37thframe.com.

Mike Johnston writes and publishes an old-fashioned, entertaining quarterly
ink-on-paper newsletter called The 37th Frame (
www.37thframe.com). He has a
B.F.A. in Photography from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in
Washington, D.C., where he was a student of the late Steve Szabo and of Joe
Cameron.

He was East Coast Editor of Camera & Darkroommagazine from 1988 to 1994 and
Editor-in-Chief of PHOTO Techniques magazine from 1994-2000, where his
editorial column "The 37th Frame" was a popular feature and where he
presented, among other things, a set of three articles on "bokeh" by John
Kennerdell, Oren Grad, and Harold Merklinger that were subsequently widely
discussed among photographers.

His critical and technical writings have appeared in various publications
and newsletters such as The Washington Review and D-Max. A number of his
articles written under the pseudonym "L. T. Gray" (el Tigre) appeared in the
English magazine Darkroom User.